Posted
by
timothyon Tuesday March 17, 2009 @09:41AM
from the paging-dr-streisand-dr-streisand dept.

cpudney writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has added several Wikileaks pages to its controversial blacklist. The blacklisted pages contain Denmark's list of banned websites. Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine as the hosts of the popular Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool, discovered last week when they published a forum post that linked to an anti-abortion web-site recently added to ACMA's blacklist. The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian government's proposed mandatory ISP-level Internet censorship legislation. Wikileaks' response to notification of the blacklisting states: 'The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.'" So Australians aren't allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren't allowed to see?

Interesting how there are several dozen links to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk on this Thai list. What's being blocked? The biography of the Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej. The future of internet is NOW. Citizens have no right knowing who makes for their government. That's the future right at your fingertips. Glad Germany will get this pretty soon, too. I love to be protected from things that aren't supposed to be secret.

Aussie here, it has always been my contention that Conroy was in charge of the project to drag it out and make sure it DIDN'T happen, I think they are about to sign the death certificate...

Relevent info in amoungst the links...

"The Greens and Opposition also oppose the scheme, meaning any legislation to implement it will be blocked. The Opposition has obtained legal advice that "legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required", but others have said it may be possible to implement the scheme without legislation. Speaking at a telecommunications conference last week, Senator Conroy urged Australians to have faith in MPs to pass the right legislation."

I think the salient (how do you spell that?) point is "you saw". Healthy paranioa says that there are plenty to people that dissapear even in the United States of Australia.

As a roo and emu passport holder, currently based O/S, I'll happily mirror a list or seed a torrent on my PC of banned sites. The Australian Govt can fornicate off on this lump of fertilizer. Bittorrent... is there anything you can't do?

I agree you have summarised the politics well. However this doesn't mean Labor are immune to the back-handed machevalian bullshit that Liberals did so poorly (I say poorly because they got caught doing it time and again). Labor is playing the same "game" with Fielding as Howard did when he "wanted" to implement mandatory filters (that his party are now blocking in opposition). There were similar circumstances for Howard at the time (ie: a censorship nut holding a deciding vote on more important legislation)

Actually, Australia (or at least the Federation of, & the Constitution) was founded by lawyers & politicians [wikipedia.org], which kinda explains why there isn't a guarantee of freedom of speech. Might interfere with their livelihoods;)
Interesting aside, many people who are descended from convicts in Australia actually take pride in it - possibly a colonial equivalent of being descended from people who came across on the Mayflower?

Quoting myself here:
"[...]many of Australia's rights are "implied" in the constitution and exist merely through the High Court's "creative" interpretations.
Such as the implied right for Political speech in Australian Captial Television Pty Ltd v. Commonwealth (1992) which was also extended in 1994 in Theophanous v. The Herald And Weekly Times. Australia also took an active role in 1948 when drafting the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Unfortunately, many attempts to introduce entrenched Human Rights into the constitution such Lionel Murphy in 1973 and 1985 with the Federal attorney-general have failed before they even reached the stage of a referendum."

We have no constitutional rights to free speech. We do have implied protected political speech, but that's not in the constitution. In practice, however, we have free speech. In fact, I can say things like s^@$[CARRIER LOST]

Additionally, Pike notes, another "absurd ruse" is that "hate criminals affect interstate commerce, by terrorizing their victims into traveling across state lines â" or not."
"Considering the pervasive influence of interstate commerce upon our lives, how often can the government meddle in local hate crimes enforcement? Any time," Pike wrote. "In fact, this ridiculous argument could be used to justify federal intervention in a crime of any kind, since any crime victim might be

"Couldn't they just bring you before the Canadian Human Rights Commission? No jury there."

There is no jury there because it isn't a criminal charge, and sure, and just like any Federal tribunal I'd make application for judicial review under Section 18 of the Federal Courts Act. Charter rights clearly take precedence to a tribunal.

The Australian Senate (which is where such legislation would be blocked) is semi-proportional - and Senators sit for six years (twice the length as in the House of Representatives). Which means that a party has to win elections fairly comfortably two years in a row in order to be able to push through whatever they want.
And as our last (Howard) government found out, being able to push through whatever (Workchoices) they want can end in a political backlash. Australian voters don't like either party having too much power, many actually vote for third parties in the Senate precisely as a control on the system. A previously successful third party (the Australian Democrats) had an unofficial slogan, "Keeping the bastards honest."

I'm currently in Australia and can get to the list of banned sites on Wikileaks just fine.
I'm at work and we use http://www.macquarietelecom.com/ [macquarietelecom.com]

The mandatory censorship scheme is not yet in place.

The blacklist referred to is the current list that is sent to the maintainers of local PC based child filtering systems. Until December last year, the government provided these free to any interested parents. The uptake was so poor that this scheme was canceled and the current censorship proposal is supposed to work better "to protect the children". The blacklist doesn't do anything else at the moment.

Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine (snip) The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian (snip)

So you receive a letter on your mailbox saying that you were fined in AUD $11,000 , for linking to a site that you didn't know you could link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?

Has someone on the Aussie's Government been playing Paranoia recently?

So you receive a letter on your mailbox saying that you were fined in AUD $11,000 , for linking to a site that you didn't know you could link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?

Doesn't the Australian court system offer its citizens some kind of protection against this?

And you used America to get rid of your puritans;) Seems pretty ironic that your convicted criminals were more loyal to the Empire than your religious zealots.

Dead people don't pay protection money. While organized crime sometimes need to "set an example" or start gang wars, what they really want to do is business. For real willingness to kill including genocide, blowing yourself up and absurd dedication to the cause, always go with the religious zealots. Really, an absentee government half the world away should be almost ideal for organized crime, why revolt and make one right there that could really create problems?

It was ideal for organised crime [wikipedia.org], and it started early, to the point where the army was involved and staged Australia's first and only military coup when the Governor tried to put a stop to it.

The Southern colonies actually *were* used as prison dumping grounds. Interestingly enough, when the Revoultion happened, that's where the "Loyalists" were concentrated.

The British landed an army in Georgia and marched north, turning over pacified areas to the Loyalists as they went. The problem was that the further north they went, the less Loyalists they found. It didn't work at all once they got to Virginia. The army finally got bottled up in Yorktown, Virg

Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine (snip) The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian (snip)

So you receive a letter on your mailbox saying that you were fined in AUD $11,000 , for linking to a site that you didn't know you could link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?

This is truly bizarre. Sounds like it's a law that's designed to be accidentally broken.

I don't think it'll stand up in any court. It's just wrong on too many levels.

The link in question was to an anti-abortion page containing some pictures of aborted babies. Apparently a member of the forum decided to test the filter by posting a link to the page and then submitting a complaint to the ACMA asking for such a link to be banned, for the purpose of seeing what would happen.

Lo and behold someone at the ACMA must of looked at the page, seen the pictures (I'm sure you can find much worse in any medical journal mind you) and decided that linking to the page was now illegal. So they sent a notice to the forum's hosting provider (bypassing the forum all together) informing them to take the link down within 24 hours or risk being fined $11K per day. The host then contacted the forum admin who obviously didn't want to put this on his provider took down the link.

I initially thought nothing would come of this ridiculous filter idea because it was just so plain stupid and so many people, including most ISPs, are against it. But I'm not so sure anymore.

Goatse [whitehat.net.nz] The original mammoth asshole you wish you never saw.

And how can we not include TubGirl [forumspile.com] Another image you really wish you never saw, unless of course you think getting blasted in your face with your own fountain of enema spray is really really HOT.

For someone who hasn't been following this too closely - were they still pretending that this was about blocking child pr0n (in which case, this shows the claim up to be false), or did they drop that pretence?

(Even if it was about blocking child images, laws about automatic fines for linking are very worrying - linking to such images can be dealt with specific laws, and it should be up to a court to decide if the image constituted an illegal image; it shouldn

I initially thought nothing would come of this ridiculous filter idea because it was just so plain stupid and so many people

Just wait. In the end, it will certainly be scrapped *, but in the meantime, there will be many lulz.

When people implement ridiculous ideas, the only thing they accomplish is to provide fodder that helps prevent the idea from being implemented again. And they get their 15 minutes of fame, even if they wish they could take it all back.

To be fair, the fine is for ignoring a request for deleting links to prohibited content. It would be stupid to significantly penalise someone for breaking a law they aren't allowed to know about... but if I had a dollar for every time I thought "That would be stupid, there's no way the ALP will possibly incorporate that into the net censorship plan", I'd be able to forget about this whole financial crisis and retire at 26.

What's just as concerning is the apparent recursive nature of the blacklist. Link to prohibited content, and your website becomes prohibited content. Therefore, any links to your website become prohibited content. Given the nature of hyperlinking and the internet, the whole web is probably only a few steps away from being banned. At this stage, I'm not even sure that's not what Labor wants.

It's actually worse than this - the blacklist doesn't just deal with "prohibited content", it deals with "potential prohibited content". In other words, material that has not been found to be prohibited, but which a single bureaucrat thinks has the potential to be prohibited if it was investigated. Given that even MA15+ (i.e. material that is legal for a 15-year-old to view) content can be prohibited, and a significant proportion of the blacklist is legal for 18-year-olds to view (i.e. R18+ and X18+), that's an extremely low threshold for something to be considered off-limits to Australian web users by our government.

Ugh... the whole thing sickens me. I was hoping it would have been dropped like a hot potato for now, but it's obvious they aren't backing down. Our only hope is if it goes to a vote in the senate and fails.

I'm not the mods, of course, so I can't say; but I'm sincerely hoping that the "insightful" mods are a mixture of "funny; but I think you deserve karma" and "Insightful; because you have correctly caricatured precisely the response that a creepy statist would actually exhibit".

I urge anybody who actually agrees with my original post to explore a fulfilling career in being on fire.

I know, it's like these people read Kafka for ideas on how to F things up.

OT, but I once had a friend in the Marine Corps who had his clearance suspended due to an investigation into his supposed leaking of classified information (for which he was eventually cleared). The investigation contained Secret information, so they couldn't show him the charges that were pressed against him. We had some good laughs about Kafka, especially once it was all over.

This has nothing to do with fascism. The problem with fascism wasn't censorship. Censorship is bad, fascism included censorship as a matter of course, but it's not what was particularly bad about fascism. Soviet Russia wasn't fascist. It was bad too, just not in the same way.Today the United States are much closer to fascism than Australia, yet they enjoy incomparable freedom of speech.Militarization of the economy, dubious appeals to patriotism, booming prison population, the collusion between corporate interests and government, that's fascist-ish.Censorship, that's what you find in China, which is not nearly as bad as the US in the areas I just listed (but by no means any better overall, don't get me wrong.)

Step 1) Run a simple web spider that checks availability but never actually pulls content, from within Australia.
Step 2) Run the same spider in any non-censoring country.
Step 3) Compare the two lists.

Simple as that. Nothing more than a few hundred megs of shotgun-requests, and you can map the portions of the
web that look dark but shouldn't.

Step 1) Run a simple web spider that checks availability but never actually pulls content, from within Australia.
Step 2) Run the same spider in any non-censoring country.
Step 3) Compare the two lists.

You'd better be quick. The amount of non-censoring countries is drying very fast.

All you have to do to get a copy of the blacklist is check every URL on the entire internet twice.

Given the choice between dealing with government bureaucracy or using a technical end-run around the same, I'll
take the technical approach every time. At least it will deterministically give the desired results.

And as I mentioned, you don't need to get the whole page, just check the headers. This task would also parallelize
perfectly... A few dozen people splitting the task between them could probably do it in under an hour. You could further
optimize it by only checking the list of possible positives in the noncensoring-country phase.

But by all means, feel free to complain to the politicians, and see which of us gets an answer first... And which of us
trusts the answer we get (if any).

Personally, I think this would make an interesting exercise for a potential link aggregation site... Run the same experiment
daily from various known-censoring countries, and post them to the FP so everyone can instantly see the day's new "Big Brother
disapproves of this" content. Sort of an automated Streisand effect.

And as I mentioned, you don't need to get the whole page, just check the headers. This task would also parallelize perfectly... A few dozen people splitting the task between them could probably do it in under an hour

LOL. I take it you've never actually tried to write or run a web crawler before? It's a fun exercise.. try it sometime.

...but when did Australia become the poster boy for blatant censorship and policies akin to fascism? I lived there for awhile back in the early 90s and it seemed like such a laid-back, friendly place where pretty much anything goes so long as it doesn't hurt anyone.

The irony of all this is I remember getting a "talking to" by a fellow in a bar who held up McCarthyism as one of America's saddest moments because it directly attacked free speech and free thought of individuals in the name of the "commie boogyman". With news like this coming out of Australia, I'm wondering if I'm going to see him again on TV in some show trial, being accused of thoughtcrime.

Actually, no, I won't, because unlike the McCarthy hearings, the ones in Australia would probably be censored.

This isn't a popular opinion but I think it's a natural consequence of people turning to Government for all manner of problems that Government wasn't originally intended to deal with. In the words of Thomas Jefferson: "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have"

It is a direct correlate to the financial meltdown: it is a political meltdown. The political class has become too powerful, too insular, too overconfident, and too stupid. And just like the financial crisis, this is a worldwide phenonmenon, ranging from the Taliban to the Australians to the Danes. There is no escape.

>It's as if countries in the "western" world these days are in a race to see who can remove citizen rights the fastest.

>I really don't understand it. Have we really fallen so far so fast?

*All* governments have *always* wanted the ability to spy on everyone, including their own citizens. It's not even paranoia or a matter of the government somehow having a mind of its own: it's just individuals doing their jobs and wanting to make sure that they never get in trouble for not having done enough to keep

Only because a bunch of "progressives" got the bright idea that we needed more "democracy". The Founding Fathers rightly feared the power of the mob and took steps to mitigate how much damage it could do. If you want to limit the influence of the media let's start by repealing the 17th amendment and flogging those that want to get rid of the electoral college.

...but when did Australia become the poster boy for blatant censorship and policies akin to fascism?

Shortly after the government banned all useful weapons so that they didn't need to fear the people anymore.

Followed by;

Mod parent up. Note how Orwellian Orwell's home country has also gotten after the effective banning of all firearms and how they're on the verge of banning knives, now, too, in a desperate attempt to legislate civility.

The vast majority of the list looks like kiddie porn sites or links to kiddie porn sights. You know, teenagers and younger being exploited.

Frankly, the Danes and the Australians are doing the "liberal" thing in trying to block these sites. If they block everyone, they reason, the sites will go out of business and the exploitation will stop. That's admirable.

But... since I'm an American.... I would rather let the people go to these sites, determine who is getting their jollies off looking at this stuff,

If they block everyone, they reason, the sites will go out of business and the exploitation will stop. That's admirable.

And if we outlaw drugs, people still stop using them and drug abuse will stop. That's admirable.

But... since I'm an American.... I would rather let the people go to these sites, determine who is getting their jollies off looking at this stuff, and then let's round up all these sick f--- people and kill them.

That thought has occurred to me as well. Why block these sites when you could presumably get warrants to see who is going to them and actually investigate the people breaking the law instead of trying to impose a censorship scheme that will never work anyway?

Because it's not actually about stopping childporn, it's about imposing censorship. Whether childporn is weeded out is irrelevant, and these filters don't actually have be effective at stopping childporn to be effective at making people complacent.

Well I would say that just leaving them up would be bordering on entrapment.It wouldn't be hard for somebody to spam people with HTML Email with links back to those sites. Most people don't turn off the images in email like I do.If a site is illegal in a certain country for some reason and that country decided to block it then that list should be made public.Keeping the list secret is just wrong.Every site that is blocked should have a reason that it is blocked and they type of content that is on it. If yo

With laws like this the pedos will realize that they need to move on to something more secure than open HTTP.

This way the kids and politicians alike will not be able to see the stuff; just like it was before the Internet took off. Politicians will then be able to back to the way they used to handle this problem: http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2009-03-15/ [dilbert.com] (focus on the last pane)

Is because it is self indulgence and traditionally our culture is against self indulgence. When people are focused on their bodies, they aren't doing anything productive, and more importantly, are fixated firmly on themselves and not the world around them. That's a good value and to some extent gay activism will always bump into the charge that identifying oneself so strongly with one's sexuality is to accept a narcissistic lifestyle that is sorely at odds with the values that actually worked to make the

Sex is traditionally connected with the biological urge to procreate....So, I plainly think you're wrong

Well, I'm not. The taboos against sexuality are driven by those who have some serious misgivings about the animal nature of man. A lot of people say that sexual taboos stem from procreation so that they can say that those taboos should be removed, rather than try and attack the idea that humans should not be so body focused head on.

Other people do say that though, and have said it. The whole "if it feel

By far the nastiest and most insidious threat to democracy in Australia is the Catholic far Right. Their home has traditionally been the "right" of the ALP, although some Catholic militants, like Tony Abbott have gone joined the opposition conservative parties.

In years past, they've played mostly a spoiling role in Australia politics. As fascists, they know only how to destroy, not build, so they formed a right-wing fringe political party (the Democratic Labour Party, which in Whitlam's immortal words, was neither democratic, nor liberal, nor a party) kept the ALP out of government for 25 years and the country stagnated for decades under a conservative government. After B. A. Santamaria died and after the fall of Communism, they went back to infiltrating mainstream political parties.

These days, their strongholds are right-wing unions (the SDA , of which I was a member -- if I had known my union dues were being siphoned off by Phalangists and militant anti-abortionists, I would've quit instantly...), and the right wings of the ALP and Liberal parties.

Democracy and rational debate has always been anathema for these fascists. Their malign and destructive influence has been out there for all to see, although there has been very few political forces organised enough to challenge them head on.

Hopefully this will not come to be in Australia or not be up held upon legal review. Two things I find are disturbing:

1) You will be held accounting for violating the law, but you can't see the law to know how to avoid violating it.

2) All of western democracies have shown a sharp turn towards the police state in the last decade. Something they all used to stand up against and accuse non-democracies of being evil for the same polocies.

Only if you have a willing HTTP proxy to actually connect to. Far too often the technical solution of "Lets just setup a VPN!" or "We'll just encrypt it and use a proxy!" gets thrown up without realizing that you have to have a working endpoint in a lax country to work with. If you're relying on the "free" ones that pop up here and there - good luck. While you MIGHT get the HTTP proxy setup with them (VPN ain't happening), they tend to flitter in and out of existence so quickly that you're playing a game of cat and mouse more than actually using the net. You're certainly not going to perform a few keystrokes and make the problem go away.

And without using them or finding some pay equivalent (that you can trust), you have to work in a data connection, server space, and power in some nonrestrictive country. When you start factoring in collocating a server in Mexico then we're beyond the "Just encrypt it!" stage.

do we realy need these people around claiming to represent a consensus ? we have the technology,but we gotta do it "before" they have thier way with it.The best bumper sticker seen yet"politicians and diapers should be changed often,and for the same reasons."

I think you'll find that people with the most problems with freedom of expression are the right-wing (and extremely conservative) Catholics like Stephen Conroy and Nicola Roxon. The people doing the oppressing here are the conservatives and their enablers, not the small-l liberals.